Last Sunday was the examination, for the Bronze award. Things did not begin well. For some reason she chose this Sunday to turn her nose up at the training treats I had. Thankfully one of the other owners leant we some cheesy ones which she loved.
The assessment began. I found myself feeling anxious about it. It actually felt worse than my driving test, but I kept centering myself and saying “The fear prayer” over and over, under my breath. “God please remove my fear and direct my attention to what you would have me be. Molly was her usual calm self. Just playing in-between the different tests. Things went well. There was a moment during the stay command, when the dogs are to stay still for a whole minute. A motorbike went past and misfired loudly, this caused a couple of dogs to move, but Molly just looked up, and stayed still. The only test that proved difficult was recall, I knew that this would be the case. She did, just not with the rushed enthusiasm of the other dogs. She came, but slowly at her own pace.
We passed the exam and will now move onto the silver award in a few weeks time. An observer of the test had been the woman who had instructed us during the first puppy classes. She said some lovely things to me about Molly and our relationship and how far she had come, saying that we must have been working hard on our relationship. I cannot tell you how much this meant to me.
One thing I have noticed since Molly came into my life has been an increase in old feelings of self-consciousness. Not so much about myself but how others perceive me, through Molly. People do offer comments all the time about her and I have taken on board the odd critical one. On the whole though she is a lovely dog, very calm, friendly and sociable, pretty fearless too. She is smart and knows her own mind. She is not at all self conscious, she is fully conscious of herself and the world in which she lives and breathes and enjoys her being. She is teaching me so much. Molly is a treasure and fully awake.
As I was reflecting about Sunday this week I was reminded of a story attributed to the Buddha.
It is said that soon after his enlightenment that the Buddha passed a man on the road who was struck by the Buddha's extraordinary radiance and peaceful presence. The man stopped and asked, "My friend, what are you? Are you a celestial being or a god?"
"No," said the Buddha.
"Well, then, are you some kind of magician or wizard?"
Again the Buddha answered, "No."
"Are you a man?" "No."
"Well, my friend, then what are you?"
The Buddha replied, "I am awake"
The Buddha was awake, he was fully conscious to all that is and all that will ever be. He was fully integrated, he did not see himself as separate, well he did not see himself at all.
Now this is not a claim I would or could make about myself. I believe I am more awake these days than I have ever been in the past, but I am very aware of a sense of separation from time to time. That said I am more conscious than I ever was before. There is a simple reason for this, I am less self-conscious than I once was. Of course, I am not yet the perfectly self-actualised enlightened being. It is highly unlikely that I ever will be, but I am not crippled by self consciousness these days, it does not paralyse me. I feel more connected, at one, with all that is, than at any other time in my life. I feel conscious, I feel awake, but I used to be terribly self-consciousness and I suspect that it was this that was the very root cause of so much of that aching loneliness that used to eat away at me. I felt, separate, cut off, alone. How many of us feel like this, it is so much the plague of the modern age.
It has been interesting to notice how I have been revisited by some of these feelings recently. I was terribly self conscious as a child, there are many reasons for this, or should I say I found many reasons for it. One being a birth defect. I was born with some of the nerve endings at the base of my spine being underdeveloped. It was something akin to a less severe form of spina bifida. As a child I had to frequently go for physiotherapy and there was a period when I was not allowed to engage in any sport. I hated the feeling it engendered in me as I looked at the other kids running around in the playground, knowing I wasn’t allowed to join in.
It was a few years later when the pain really hit me though, in my mid to later teens when I was painfully aware of the way I walked. I remember walking down the street of the town I grew up in and whenever I saw someone walking towards me I would stand up straight and attempt to push my feet inwards in the vain hope that they wouldn’t think that there was something wrong with me. I must have looked a right sight.
I was just so terribly self-consciousness; I was just so locked in on what I believed was wrong with me. Today I have come to understand that the problem was not my perceived physical imperfections. I suspect that if I’d been born without this physical difficulty the problem would have manifested in other areas of my life. The problem was the self-consciousness, I was locked in myself and therefore not fully conscious, I was separate and felt alone.
One thing I’ve learnt over the years is that I am not alone in this. So many of us suffer from forms of self-consciouness. We feel lost, lonely and cut off because we are locked in what we believe is wrong with us. Sometimes it is harder to see what is right, than what is wrong. This is a deeply lonely, isolated, way to be.
Socrates said that “The unexamined life is not worth living”. Now while not wishing to argue with the great philosopher I do wonder if the “over examined life” can prove just as worthless. It is so easy to get lost in oneself, wrapped up in our own underwear to such an extent that we do not live at all. We can become so self-conscious that we fail to become conscious of all that is and all that has ever been. It is so easy to become wrapped up in our own perceived needs that we fail to live in the world with others and then complain about feeling lonely. Yes it is important to examine ourselves, to understand who we are and what makes us tick, but that should not be an end in itself, a destination. It is a staging post in the spiritual adventure, but not an end in itself.
Now this form of self-absorption has been labelled Narcissism. You remember the ancient Greek story of the boy who fell so in love with his own reflection that he fell into the water and drowned. I’m not sure that it is entirely correct to label this form of self-consciousness this way. There seems very little love there at all. Quite the opposite in fact the pre-occupation is with what is wrong. When you look at your own reflection in the mirror, what do you see? Do you see someone that you love? Do you see who you really are? While we may see ourselves warts and all, how many of us see the beauty spots too? The self-absorption that most people I come into contact with suffer from tends to be a deeply ingrained negative type. The preoccupation is often with what is wrong with them, with their shame, rather than how wonderful they are.
This kind of self-consciousness can become so consuming that it takes over our human interactions. I wonder how many of us suffer from this kind of commentary when we meet up with people. “What will they think of me?” “How do I look?” “If I say something, will they think I’m an idiot?” and then as it continues, “He gave me a funny look, he must have thought me a fool. Why on earth did I have to make that stupid remark? Gosh I’m such a freak, they all seem to be staring at me.”
This kind of inner dialogue can be so crippling. It can haunt us from the moment we wake and continue throughout our day, eating away at our every decision. Oh and of course because we doubt ourselves and every decision we make, we assume that everyone else must be doing exactly the same thing. This kind of self-consciousness can be so crippling and it blocks us off almost entirely from the world around us. When we become consumed by this kind of self-consciousness we see the world from our own point of view and it aint a pretty one.
So what can we do about it? How do we wake up to a greater consciousness? How do we break free from this crippling self-consciousness?
In the Gospel’s Jesus taught his followers that they must lose themselves in order to be found. That by emptying ourselves of our self-absorption we begin to be filled with the spirit of neighbourliness. So that when we look deeply into the still waters we are not drawn in by narcissistic self-consciousness and loathing at our own reflection, but rather into a deeper contemplation of our shared lives. We become conscious of all that is, all that has been and all that will ever be. By opening ourselves to and for others we begin to shed that debilitating skin of self-consciousness that is so easy to become imprisoned in.
Gandhi said “The best way to find yourself is to lose yourself in service of others”
The Buddha talked of Nirvana, of being freed from the suffering that was the blight of humanity. He showed that we all suffered and that it was in seeing our suffering as individual that led to this sense of separation. He suggested that we needed to break through our suffering not only to serve others but to reach a higher state of being, true consciousness, to be awake.
Now please don’t get me wrong I am not suggesting that we do not need to know ourselves to understand how we tick. All I am saying is that we must not get stuck there, we must not get lost there and we must not see this as a destination, more a staging post on the journey. The adolescent stage I suspect. Sadly for many folk, me included, this adolescent stage often goes well into adulthood.
So how do we move from self-consciouness to consciousness. Well Forrest Church in his wonderful book “Lifecraft” offered three simple suggestions, which he called the three “E’s”, “empathy”, “ecstasy” and “enthusiasm”. The key he claimed could be found in the literal understanding of these words. “Empathy”, to suffer or feel with another; “Ecstasy”, to stand outside ourselves; “Enthusiasm”, to manifest the god (theos) within us.
Empathy is a deep felt compassion. When we open our hearts empathically to another we are courageously refusing to allow self-consciousness to stand in the way of a higher consciousness that comes into being as we feel what another is going through. In so doing we serve both ourselves and the other person, as well as that higher consciousness beyond our singular selves.
Now ecstasy has often been misunderstood as some kind of hedonistic state and therefore self- indulgent, it is far from this. In its truest sense what it actually does is takes us out of ourselves and lifts us beyond the confines of ourselves. In so doing we transcend our self-consciousness and enter a realm in which purpose begins to emerge and meaning is found.
Enthusiasm means to be filled with spirit, with holy energy. Enthusiasm allows us to be fully involved and engaged in whatever it is we are doing. It allows us to see beyond the confines we have created. Forrest himself states that “Here, once again, consciousness displaces self-consciousness. We escape from our mirrored room. Its mirrors turn into windows. Or the pond grows so still that we can see beyond our own reflection to the trees and clouds and birds and sun. There is, by the way, no higher form of spiritual practice. When we step out of our own shadow, consciousness replaces self-consciousness.”
In so doing we are set free to walk with others in our own faltering ways. Instead of being lost in what we believe is wrong with us we are set free to do what we can in this our shared world and in so doing we encourage others to do the same, as perfectly imperfect children of God.
For me the purpose of the spiritual life is to develop a deepening sense of connection. We all have our troubles and our worries either within ourselves, those around us or our wider world. We need to see them for what they are, we need to acknowledge the truth, but we must not get stuck there, for that will paralyse us and stop us doing what we can. We cannot change the way the world is but that need not prevent us from doing what we can do and in doing so we will grow spiritually as we become integrated into all that has been, all that exists and all that will ever.
So there you have a solution to self-consciousness, a way to develop consciousness, the three “E’s”, “empathy”, “ecstasy” and “enthusiasm”. “Empathy”, to suffer or feel with another; “Ecstasy”, to stand outside ourselves; “Enthusiasm”, to manifest the god (theos) within us.
As a kind of conclusion I’d like to leave you with one final thought. I think that so much of modern spiritually gets it wrong because it is seeking the wrong thing. There is so much talk of finding ourselves, when in actual fact what we ought to be doing is losing ourselves. What we ought to be striving for, I believe, is integration and remove those aspects within ourselves that block this. We all ask the question “Who am I?” when really we ought to asking is “How am I doing? And if we are still feeling utterly dis-connected we need to ask why? And how can I integrate once again? You see if we can begin to integrate with all that is, all that has been and all that has ever been we begin to truly cohere. In doing so we transcend our self-consciousness and become conscious. We become spiritually mature. We become like the Buddha, awake.
I was thinking this as I watched Molly rolling and dancing and frolicking with several other dogs in the park the other day, what a joy, what a freedom, oh to be so awake.
So how conscious are you today? Are you truly awake?
Below is a video devotion based on the material in this "Blogspot"
